HISTORY
A PERSONAL AND HISTORICAL NOTE
The origin and inception of a dispersed order for ordained scientists
The roots of our Society of Ordained Scientists go back in my own thinking to over 30 years ago when I began to take an active interest, as a layman, in Christian theology. I was working in my 'spare' time for the Diploma in Theology at Birmingham University and it struck me forcibly how supine the church appeared to be in response to the new challenges arising from developments in many intellectual spheres and most of all in the natural sciences. As I put it later, in an article entitled 'The Church in an Age of Science' in the Church Times of 26 January 1962,
The general impression of the man-in-the-street is of the Church fighting a rearguard action, doomed to defeat. Moreover those whom the Church is trying to reach are increasingly better equipped intellectually through secondary and higher education. Although only a small proportion of the population as a whole have any accurate scientific knowledge, it is science and technology which are creating new attitudes. To people so influenced the language of the Church appears to be not only obscure but obscurantist and, even, dishonest. The clergy are, through no fault of their own, ill-equipped to speak effectively to a scientifically conditioned people, for the proportion of them who have had any scientific education is practically negligible (almost too small, less than one percent, to be recorded in the PEP survey, 'Graduate Employment'. of 1954). Thus, the ordained leadership of all the churches contains practically none who understand, from the inside, the chief formative influence in the mind of modern man.
The recognition of the need by the Church for a more convincing apologetic in relation to the sciences was, no doubt, in the mind of Bishop Bell of Chichester in one of the last motions which he proposed to the Convocation of Canterbury:
That this House, while greatly appreciating the steadily increasing interest now being taken in adult education and wishing to encourage it in every way, is also much concerned as to the need for examination and study by qualified church men and women into the moral and spiritual significance of modern scientific discoveries for human life and conduct, in co-operation with scientists and others whose vocation or experience brings them into contact with these and similar problems.
This motion was carried unanimously on 2 October 1957, but no more was heard of it!
Thus it was that, when I was invited by Mervyn Stockwood to address the Southwark Diocesan Meeting on 16 November 1960, I drew attention to this situation and urged the Church at the diocesan level to utilise the insights and knowledge of the scientific graduates in its membership as an intellectual spearhead for the Church in regard to the challenge of new scientific knowledge. I even dropped the hint that what was needed in the 20th century was the flexible equivalent of what the Dominican order had been at its foundation -- namely, a resource for the Church and its shock troops in meeting the intellectual challenges of its day. I believe moves were subsequently made in the diocese of Southwark for a team of scientists to act as a panel or 'guild' to be available to address issues raised by science for faith before various audiences (sixth-forms, workers groups, etc.), but I heard no more about that.
In my article in the Church Times of January 1962, I referred to these moves and went on to suggest:
Perhaps such diocesan 'guilds' of Christian psychologists, economists, scientists, and so on, might one day develop into a new form of order within the Church.
That 'one day' was a long time coming, some 25 years, but at least it has now come in the S.O.Sc.!
At that time, as a layman -- and by then working (indeed overworking) as a chemistry tutor and biochemistry lecturer in Oxford -- this idea was couched mainly in terms of some sort of 'lay apostolate', with the proviso that the scientists involved in it should also have a proper theological education. These ideas simmered and eventually found their first expression in the convening, initially by myself, of consultations between scientists, theologians and clergy who were concerned to relate their scientific knowledge and methods of study to their religious faith and practice. These consultations took place in Oxford (1972), Cambridge (1973) and Norwich (1974) and let to the inauguration of the Science and Religion Forum (S.R.F.) at Durham in 1975. It continues to flourish and to be, as its title indicates, a most valuable forum for the exchange of ideas in an open dialogue between religion and science.
All this had been very much at the level of the head, but the heart too has its reasons, and during this development of the S.R.F. I intuited, instinctively discerning almost, that somehow a purely intellectual dialogue between those engaged in the scientific and theological enterprises was not enough. For theology, 'theo-logy', is ex hypothesi concerned with words about God -- and words restrict and confine. God is in the 'still, small voice' and in the silences that follow louder, more articulate exercises. Theo-logy cannot of itself be the experience of God who is known through life in prayer, in worship, and in silence. Furthermore, I began to see that the Church needs not only intellectual inquiry of the kind stimulated by the S.R.F. and other bodies, but it needs a cadre of committed and informed members to constitute a new kind of order (the Dominican idea again?), held together by prayer and sacrament, and committed to the life of science for and on behalf of the Church -- to represent the Church in science and science in the Church. The requirement of this double commitment -- to both science and the Church -- led me to think of the possible members of such an order as those with an explicit double vocation with respect to both and so to think of it as being constituted of 'priest-scientists'. I was encouraged in this by an increasing awareness that, unlike the situation 20 years previously (and referred to in the first quotation above from my 1962 Church Times article), the Church of England now possessed a considerable number of able and well- qualified scientists amongst its priests and deacons -- to the often- expressed astonishment of members of other churches, especially those predominant outside Britain, who had noted this phenomenon.
I began a process of mentioning what I feared might be seen as this crazy idea to a number of priest-scientists known to me. These approaches were necessarily tentative, personal and private for the whole idea was only an intuition and I needed to know if anyone else shared the same concern. I can only take it as an outreach of God as Holy Spirit that it transpired that all those with whom I broached the matter did respond sensitively and warmly to my, still inchoate, suggestions. In particular, it was Canon Eric Jenkins (then Vicar of Hightown and Science Advisor in the Liverpool Diocese) above all who began to devote his tenacious and efficient organising powers to furthering the process of making it actually happen. I gladly refer to his foregoing account of subsequent events and I continue with some of the aspects known to me personally.
During this period of 1985-6, I took the advice of various people. These included: Canon Donald Allchin (then of Canterbury), who had a wide experience of religious communities (we met in Oxford on 18 November 1985); Bishop Michael Mann, because of a possible connection with St George's, Windsor; the late Revd Professor Eric Mascall, who made available valuable information concerning the Oratory of the Good Shepherd, a dispersed Anglican order of which he was a member; Dr Margaret Bowker, to whom I owed much spiritual counsel; and, on her advice, the Revd Gerard Hughes, S.J., because of his skill and experience in advising nascent groups or communities on how to come to their collective decisions. Illumination in this matter was important for those of us who had been involved in the developments up to the middle of 1986, because of the impending consultation on 5 June 1985 at Windsor of a dozen or so of those who had expressed rapport with the general idea. A decision whether or not to pursue it would then have to be made.
Fr Hughes was invited but could not come to that consultation, but I was able to see him at Manresa House in Harborne, Birmingham, on 28 May 1986, and to hear him amplify in person the passages about making group decisions which I had found so helpful in his God of Surprises (Darton, Longman and Todd, London, 1985, 1986, especially pp. 146-9). His advice in this regard is based on the experience of St Ignatius Loyola and his friends who, when at a crucial point in their self-definition as a group, had to decide whether or not to remain together and to take a vow of obedience (that is, to become a religious order) or to part, using their (considerable) individual talents more individually and separately. Gerard Hughes describes the event in his book (pp. 146-7) and what I learnt from that, and more directly from him, was the wisdom, after a general discussion of all the pros and cons and ramifications of a proposal of this ilk, of having a long interval of silence during which all those present could go away to meditate and pray privately. Only after this is there a re-assembling, when each individual states in turn the outcome of this process of reflection, with no further argument.
It was this procedure which was, in principle, implemented at Windsor on 5 June 1986, which led, as Eric Jenkins's account reports, to the definite decision by those present to form a new dispersed order of ordained scientists.
From that point on, I found myself swept along by the current of the common mind and as the agent, with Eric Jenkins, of that accelerating process of communal consent which brought the Society of Ordained Scientists into existence and which characterises its ongoing present.
LAUS DEO Arthur Peacocke
Oxford, January 1994
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